One of the most cherished and informative web blogs on the internet, Engadget has decided to temporarily turn off the comments section of the blog, meaning that the readers can no longer post comments on any of the posts published on the website. As per the editor in chief of Engadget, Joshua Topolsky, the blog that used to be a platform for intellectual and technology oriented discussions, had now turned into a battle field of outright abuses, racism, sexism and inflammatory remarks. The torrent of negative comments started pouring since the exhaustive coverage of the Apple iPad tablet by Engadget.

Engadget is co-owned by AOL Inc. and is hailed as one of the most respected venues for information and the latest news in science and technology. The website has a humongous reader base, with millions of users and at times, the blog has even registered million of readers in a single day. In an interview with Venture Beat, Mr. Topolsky brushed off the idea that, the decision to turn off the comments was anywhere related to pressure exerted by the website’s advertisers.

He stated that, the advertisers had no role in the decision, and it was simply to put a halt to the now out of control verbal abuse that was happening throughout the blog. There were even instances, where users flung abusive remarks to the staff of Engadget and accused the blog of being paid by Apple Inc. to do more coverage of the iPad event.

According to Joshua Topolsky,

“We have a huge readership, but the vast majority of our readers do not comment. But we’ve had an influx of new readers due to our iPad coverage last week, which blew away our previous [traffic] expectations. “They’re not coming here to talk about technology They’re coming to incite arguments. They’ll post things like ‘VAIOs suck, Macs rule,’ or ‘Macs are gay.’ They’ll go off-topic and get racist or sexist just to be inflammatory. I can handle the flamewars. But in the past few days we’ve had attacks against our readers and our staff that were personal.”

Via Venture Beat & Engadget